As enterprises accumulate ever-greater amounts of data on their transactions, processes, products, and operations, online analytical processing using various enterprise software solutions has become an important part of doing business. The number of tools and techniques addressing analytical processing has grown, enabling data analysts to quickly analyze and navigate through vast and complex collections of data using processing software and platforms. In a computing environment with many computing devices, such as a network environment (e.g., a cloud computing environment or other network environments) with many server computers, the use of computing resources, including installed software resources, can provide a number of advantages including cost advantages and/or the ability to adapt rapidly to changing computing resource needs.
Upgrading the current version of software with a newer version is an inevitable exercise for customers as it provides fixes for known bugs and also gives newer powerful and useful features. Software upgrades can be provided in different intervals. Even though customers may be interested to try out and upgrade to newer versions of the software, there is no way for them to know if applying these upgrades wont damage the stability of their existing computing systems. While every patch or feature pack of a software upgrade goes through thorough regression testing in the development environment, a given software patch or upgrade could still fail in a customer software enterprise environment because deployments in the customer environment are complex, diverse and sometimes it is difficult to visualize the way, in which products could be used/deployed in a specific software environment.
However, validating software upgrades is time consuming, may delay the adoption of the upgrade, and therefore, may hinder implementation of essential functionalities provided by the upgrade. Therefore, there is a need for enabling software upgrades by providing a reliable and efficient solution to the customer to analyze and validate the software upgrade.